I'm killing off this character...

[Z_Penguin]

And I feel genuinely sad. He is only a child. his death would be great for the (now) four person group as a whole, but I hate the fact that he'll be gone forever and won't be able to interact with the group anymore.

I would like to bring him back, but when he comes back there is going to be another character added, and I hate managing six people groups.

 

[Naomasa298]

But are the readers going to be sad and feel his loss?

 

[Z_Penguin]

But are the readers going to be sad and feel his loss?

Yea.

 

[Madman Starryteller]

Killing characters can be tough. You spend time building them up, giving them a voice, hopefully. Maybe you even give them an arch. And then they must meet their demise. All that work, gone. All that character, never to be seen again. It is reminiscent of real loss if done right.

How the characters that survive react to the loss is part of the story, part of the human way. We kill our characters as a reflection of the world we come from. Where death is normal.

 

[Luxuria]

I understand where you are coming from. However, as a reader, i like when characters stay dead.

 

[Kallisto]

And I feel genuinely sad. He is only a child. his death would be great for the (now) four person group as a whole, but I hate the fact that he'll be gone forever and won't be able to interact with the group anymore.

I would like to bring him back, but when he comes back there is going to be another character added, and I hate managing six people groups.

This is why I stopped getting emotionally attached to my characters, but even then, there's still a lot of second guessing and a lot of second guessing whether my story really would want that character gone. Is that really the right thing for the story? Because it is a irrevocable decision. It's amazingly tricky to do a successful resurrection of characters, as it immediately reminds readers they're reading a book.

 

[Stuart Dren]

Drop him down a waterfall, but have it actually kill him. The reader will spend the rest of the story waiting for him to come back like a cat at a mousehole.

Grievous injury, marriage, or apprenticeship is a great way to back-burner characters. They can even change a bit while they're gone.

 

[GlitterRain]

Are you killing him off because the story calls for it, or because you hate managing six-person groups, as you said? If it is more the latter then the former, maybe consider a practice run, in a different document, practicing writing your group. Just write out a scene with the six characters together, having fun (or doing whatever you want - doesn’t matter). Get yourself more comfortable with managing so many characters. Then keep the character.

But if you are killing the character because the story calls for it above anything else, you have to just do it. If you are sad - a perfectly valid emotion for you to have; you did create this character after all - I think it’s likely that you wrote him well, and readers will feel the death and the loss the other characters feel.

If it helps, I killed off my main POV character in one of my stories. It was very difficult, especially when I first realized before I even got to the end of the story that I needed to do it (it’s a trilogy - I was halfway through book two when I realized it). It messed me up for three weeks, trying to fight the thoughts of his death and figure out a way that I could let him live. But I did it; he died. And I know it’s the right thing for the story, even if I still, a good six months after writing his death, miss him and wish he had a better ending.